Sorry if this has been covered in a few places, but I've searched the web and the forums and not found a solution yet.

Here's the situation: I've got [remote desktop] access to a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (SP2) which is using XAMPP to host a system.

The system uses Apache, PHP and MySQL, and is quite important for a number of people, so availability is a big issue.

Unfortunately, it's running XAMPP 1.5.1 - Apache 2.2.0, MySQL 5.0.18 and PHP 5.1.1. This is quite out of date, which I suspect is causing the two problems I'm having.

* MySQL can't be installed as a service - have tried many methods, none successful. When installed as a service, MySQL terminates unexpectedly as soon as you start it.
This means that getting MySQL to start on boot (e.g. after the server is restarted for any reason) very difficult. I've tried adding system and user logon scripts (linking to the batch file to start mysql) and have set up a scheduled event to run it every half hour as well... These have had some success (I think), but are not foolproof / don't always seem to run.

The Internet seems to imply that it IS possible to run MySQL as a service under this version of windows... I sincerely hope it is, otherwise there isn't too much point in upgrading.

Like I said, the Internet and common sense tells me "install newest version of XAMPP" should be my first step in fixing both problems.
Problem is, I can't really afford to lose data or have significant downtime while doing so - hence I don't want to blunder about in there on my own.

I've downloaded the installer and 7-zip exe versions of XAMPP 1.6.6a to the server. I need to keep the mysql/data folder and and htdocs folder, and I think I've also modified a few of the config files for Apache/PHP/MySQL... will need to carry those across, along with anything else I may have forgotten...

Can anyone recommend a course of action? I'd like to do this in as safe a way as possible - back things up, keep the old version there in some form in case I need to roll back to it, etc...